


We Didn't Start The Fire

by likethenight



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-21
Updated: 2016-02-21
Packaged: 2018-05-22 11:35:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,353
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6077883
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/likethenight/pseuds/likethenight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Clint has the radio on and Steve catches a song that gives him a load of new avenues for his research on the years he missed. JARVIS helps out a bit.</p>
            </blockquote>





	We Didn't Start The Fire

**Author's Note:**

> I was listening to the radio and Billy Joel's _[We Didn't Start The Fire](https://youtu.be/6POmPgeLW2U)_ came on, and it got me thinking about the events I learned about thanks to that song, and about how Steve might find it interesting and how it might give him a few more things to put on his list...

Clint has the radio on, tuned to some classic rock station or other, as he potters in the communal Avengers kitchen, humming along to the songs that are playing. Steve is just sitting in one of the chairs, watching Clint and idly sketching. He doesn’t know any of the songs, but he’s rather enjoying just listening to them, and listening to Clint humming along ever so slightly out of tune. Clint’s enthusiasm for the music is somewhat infectious, and that’s enough for Steve. Besides, the melodies are catchy enough, like the dancehall stuff that Bucky used to love to dance to, shuffling across the floor of their fleapit of an apartment in Brooklyn to the faint strains of an upbeat number floating in the window from someone’s radio somewhere else in the block. 

Clint breaks off his humming as a new song comes on, turning round with a smile. “Hey, Cap, you should listen to this one. Might help you catch up a bit. I mean, I know you’re getting there, but this ought to give you a few different things to put on that list of yours.” He wags the paring knife he’s holding in Steve’s direction, and asks JARVIS to turn up the music. 

The AI obliges with a murmured “Certainly, Mr Barton,” and raises the volume, and it takes Steve a moment to realize that he’s also skipped it back to the beginning of the song so that Steve doesn’t miss anything. 

The song turns out to be a quick-fire rundown of all sorts of historic events - well, events that are historic now, but that hadn’t even happened when Steve went into the ice. Steve is familiar with just enough of them to work out that the singer is skipping in chronological order from the 1950s to the ‘60s, then on into the ‘70s and ‘80s, with a chorus claiming not to have started the fire, whatever that was. Steve finds himself nodding along, to Clint’s approving grin, the tune is catchy and the rhyme and rhythm and how the lyrics are strung together are infectious and the singer’s obvious passion and fury over the events he’s singing about - Clint’s right, it’s firing Steve’s imagination, the song giving just enough hints to make him curious, and when it finishes and the next song comes on, JARVIS lowers the volume again and Clint is grinning triumphantly at him.

“Told you so,” he says. “Billy Joel, ‘We Didn’t Start The Fire’. Learned more history from that than any of the schooling I ever got. Hey J, can you send Cap the lyrics? Then he doesn’t have to listen back to it and try to scribble any of that shit down.”

“Certainly, Mr Barton,” JARVIS says again. “Captain, I have also taken the liberty of sending you links to some good websites with information about some of the events which you have not researched before.”

“Thank you, JARVIS,” says Steve. “And Clint. Thanks. I mean, I’ve been doing a lot of reading, but there are so many stories, I think even if I’d lived through it I wouldn’t have known of them all. You get the official version, and then there’s someone else’s version, and someone else’s, and they’re all so different. It’s hard to know which ones are worth looking into and which you can forget about.”

Clint shrugs. “Always a lot more than two sides to every story. You kind of get used to it after a while, especially in our line of work. Life’s too short to know about everything.” He grins again. “You pick it up where you find it, like in that song we just heard.”

“I guess so. I mean, I knew some of it, like England’s queen and Kennedy, and ‘Brooklyn’s got a winning team’,” he quotes with a smile. “That one was a good surprise when I found out about it. But ‘Edsel is a no-go’ or ‘Starkweather homicide’ - “

Clint shrugs again. “No idea, you’ll have to look those up. Probably before my time, going from where they are in the song, and even in my time I wasn’t paying a whole lot of attention to what was going on out in the world.”

“The Ford Edsel was an automobile,” JARVIS cuts in smoothly. “It was named after the son of Henry Ford, and it was not a success. In fact, the name ‘Edsel’ became a byword for commercial failure.” He pauses, as if for effect, and then continues in the same smooth, dispassionate tones. “Mr Stark’s father found the whole episode endlessly amusing.”

Steve and Clint both laugh out loud at that; JARVIS’ perfectly delivered deadpan sarcasm is an evergreen source of amusement, and Steve has to wonder how much of him beyond the name is based on Howard’s English butler. If the real man was anything like the AI, Steve is sad he never got to meet him. He’ll have to ask Peggy sometime, when she’s feeling lucid, maybe.

“I will leave you to look the rest up for yourself, Captain,” JARVIS says, and Steve is grateful for that, he likes to do things the long way round, he doesn’t much like shortcuts, especially over his learning about all the years he missed. He likes to do the reading rather than get the summary, although now he’s wondering whether, if the real Jarvis is somewhere in JARVIS’ memory banks, it might be possible to ask him for a few eyewitness accounts, the sorts of things it’s too hard for Peggy to tell him, because although her long-term memory is sharp as ever, her short-term memory is all but gone and she keeps getting distracted, keeps forgetting what she was saying. 

When Steve gets back to his floor, he settles on the sofa with his StarkPad and flicks first through the Wikipedia article for the song, and then the articles JARVIS has sent him, and then goes back to the Wikipedia article, following the links to the pages on all the people and events mentioned in the song. He spends hours and hours following one story after another, link after link after link, marking some subjects to return to and look into in more depth, and by the end of it he feels as though he understands the second half of the twentieth century a little better. Of course, it’s still only another person’s story, yet another version, and he’s still got a lot to learn - not to mention that the song finishes in the late 1980s, so that’s another twenty-five-odd years that it doesn’t cover - but as inspiration goes, it’s pretty good. Steve feels like he’s learned things that he wouldn’t have learned otherwise - ‘hypodermics on the shore’, ‘Palestine terror on the air line’, ‘hula hoops’, ‘Princess Grace’, all of them and more had escaped his notice. He’d already known about ‘homeless vets’ from Sam, who has been a fount of knowledge on the way America has treated its military veterans over the decades, and ‘Khrushchev’ and ‘Pasternak’ and ‘Sputnik’ from Natasha, who gave him a crash course in Soviet and Russian history when they were hunting for Bucky. ‘Little Rock’ and ‘Alabama’ he knew about because he had made sure to read up on the civil rights movement almost as soon as he had come out of the ice; ‘Panmunjom’, ’Dien Bien Phu falls’ and ’Ho Chi Minh’ because he’d read up on the conflicts the US had been involved in after his war was over, Korea and Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan; ‘Beatlemania’ and ‘Woodstock’ and ‘punk rock’ because he’d studied popular culture. All of it to try to understand the world he’d woken up in, and some days he still doesn’t think he’ll ever understand it, although he has the impression from several of his friends that nobody ever really quite understands all of it, and somehow that makes him feel a little better. He’s in this world now, for better or for worse, and he is damned if he’s not going to make the best job of it he can. Which includes taking opportunities to learn wherever he finds them.


End file.
